"Every one of the hundred million Arabs has been living ... to see the day Israel
is liquidated"

Cairo Radio’s Voice of the Arabs broadcast,
May 18th 1967.

The Six Day War - That was when I realised that being Jewish was an exceptionally
odd thing to be

- Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations
of the Commonwealth

We began to hear disturbing news from the Middle East. The Egyptians had
blocked the gulf of Akaba. They demanded the withdrawal of the United Nations
troops, who instantly complied. War was in the air. The State of Israel
was exposed to attack on all fronts. A catastrophe seemed to be in the making.
I, who had not lived through the Holocaust nor even thought much about it,
became suddenly aware that a second tragedy might be about to overtake the
Jewish people.

Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United
Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

It was then that an extraordinary thing began to happen. Throughout the
university Jews suddenly became visible. Day after day they crowded into
the little synagogue in the centre of town. Students and dons who had never
before publicly identified as Jews could be found there praying. Others
began collecting money. Everyone wanted to help in some way, to express
their solidarity, their identification with Israel's fate. It was some time
before we realised that the same phenomenon was repeating itself throughout
the world. From the United States to the Soviet Union, Jews were riveted
to their television screens and radios, anxious to hear the latest news,
involved, on the edge, as if it were their own lives that were at stake.
The rest is history. The war was fought and won. It lasted a mere six days,
one of the most spectacular victories in modern history. We could celebrate
and breathe safely again. Life went back to normal.

But not completely. For I had witnessed something in those days and weeks
that didn't make sense in the rest of my world. It has nothing to do with
politics or war or even prayer. It had to do with Jewish identity. Collectively
the Jewish people had looked in the mirror and said, We are still Jews.
And by that they meant more than a private declaration of faith, "religion"
in the conventional sense of the word. It meant that they felt part of a
people, involved in its fate, implicated in its destiny, caught up in its
tragedy, exhilarated by its survival. I had felt it. So had every other
Jew I knew.

Why? The Israelis were not people I knew. They were neither friends nor
relatives in any literal sense. Israel was a country two thousand miles
away, which I had visited once but in which I had no plans to live. Yet
I had no doubt that their danger was something I felt personally. It was
then that I knew that being Jewish was not something private and personal
but something collective and historical. It meant being part of an extended
family, many of whose members I did not know, but to whom I nonetheless
felt connected by bonds of kinship and responsibility.

It made no sense at all in the concepts and categories of the 1960's. That
was when I realised that being Jewish was an exceptionally odd thing to
be, structurally odd. Jewish identity was not simply a truth or set of truths
I could accept or reject. It was not a preference I could express or disavow.
It was not a faith I could adopt or leave alone. I had not chosen it. It
had chosen me. Everything I had studied in modern philosophy, everything
I had experienced in contemporary culture, told me that truth was universal
and all else was individual – personal preference, autonomous choice.
But what I had experienced was neither universal nor individual. Jewish
identity was not, nor did it aspire to be, the universal human condition.
Nor had I chosen it. It was something I was born into. But how can anyone
truly be born into specific obligations and responsibilities without their
consent? Logically it didn't add up. Yet psychologically it did. Without
any conscious decision I was reminded that merely by being born into the
Jewish people I was enmeshed in a network of relationships that connected
me to other people, other places, other times. I belonged to a people. And
being part of a people, I belonged.

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